“There’s Hollywood Elsewhere and then there’s everything else. It’s your neighborhood dive where you get the ugly truth, a good laugh and a damn good scotch.”
–JJ Abrams
(Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Super 8)
“Smart, reliable and way ahead of the curve … a must and invaluable read.”
–Peter Biskind
(Down and Dirty Pictures Easy Riders, Raging Bulls)
“He writes with an element that any good filmmaker employs and any moviegoer uses to fully appreciate the art of film – the heart.”
–Alejandro G. Inarritu
(The Revenant, Birdman, Amores Perros)
“Nothing comes close to HE for truthfulness, audacity, and one-eyed passion and insight.”
–Phillip Noyce
(Salt, Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Dead Calm)
“A rarity and a gem … Hollywood Elsewhere is the first thing I go to every morning.”
–Ann Hornaday
Washington Post
“Jeffrey Wells isn’t kidding around. Well, he does kid around, but mostly he just loves movies.”
–Cameron Crowe
(Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky)
“In a world of insincere blurbs and fluff pieces, Jeff has a truly personal voice and tells it like it is. Exactly like it is, like it or not.”
–Guillermo del Toro
(Pan’s Labyrinth, Cronos, Hellboy)
“I’ve always appreciated Jeff’s eagerness to champion the more artistically daring, less commercial projects.”
–Harvey Weinstein
The Weinstein Co.
“It’s clearly apparent he doesn’t give a shit what the Powers that Be think, and that’s a good thing.”
–Jonathan Hensleigh
Director (The Punisher), Writer (Armageddon, The Rock)
“So when I said I’d like to leave my cowboy hat there, I was obviously saying (in my head at least) that I’d be back to stay the following year … simple and quite clear all around.”
–Jeffrey Wells, HE, January ’09
“If you’re in a movie that doesn’t work, game over and adios muchachos — no amount of star-charisma can save it.”
How much of a “bump” does Criterion’s Barry Lyndon Bluray provide? A modest one — the enhanced colors and slightly finer detail don’t exactly blow you against the back wall, but they’re noticable. It’s in no way a letdown, but it’s a wee bit short of a knockout. (If you’re familiar with the 2011 Warner Home Video Bluray version, I mean — side by side the Criterion is superior but only by a horse-length or two.) What attracted me, whether I imagined it or not, is the vivid, well-layered sound. Michael Hordern‘s voice sounds extra-rich and deep and buttery. 4K scan, 1080p, 1.66:1 aspect ratio. As good as this film is ever going to look, short of the 4K version that will probably come along within two or three years.
Over the last few days bathrobes have become associated with icky predatory behavior. I’ve always hated them for reasons of my own. I’ve never owned or worn a bathrobe my entire life; I’ve never even worn one during an occasional stay in a hotel. A few years ago a friend gifted me with a black silk kimono she’d recently bought in Japan. I thanked her earnestly but felt obliged to add there was no chance I’d ever wear it. There’s something soft and sissy-lounge about guys who wear robes.
No — these aren’t stills from the riot scenes in Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit. Rather, insane as it sounds, this is all that’s left of Sasha Stone‘s SUV after it was torched last night, probably by some teenaged pyromaniac. Thank God her insurance will cover a replacement but what kind of feral, foam-at-the-mouth animal would do this kind of thing?
If, as the head of Lucasfilm marketing, I’d been recently ordered to come up with a title for Ron Howard, Kathy Kennedy, Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Han Solo film, I would have left work early on Friday. The idea would have been to withdraw from the hurly burly and think long and hard. I would make myself a pot of green tea, shut off all electronic devices, put on a Japanese robe and sandals and take long walks through the woods and along the beach.
“What to call it?,” I would ask myself over and over. “Yes, a three-year-old would have suggested Solo, and yes, I understand how the simplest approach can sometimes be the best one. But I wouldn’t want to adopt a lazy attitude. I’d want the title to be a pure and poetically perfect distillation of the Han Solo mythology.”
The answer might have hit me immediately or it might have taken all weekend, but by Sunday night my decision would be firm — Solo: A Stars Wars Tale.
“It was my reaction to Alden Ehrenreich‘s performance in Alexandre Moors‘ The Yellow Birds, which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, that convinced me he won’t be a good Solo. Aldenriech just doesn’t have that presence, that Harrison Ford cock-of-the-walk cool. There’s just something about Ehrenreich that feels guarded and clenched.”
Posted on 1.22.17: “Where In The Valley of Elah had the great Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron butting heads while looking into the stateside death of Jones’ son, The Yellow Birds mostly just wades into the frosty expressions and general lethargy of Ehrenreich’s Bartie — a guy I had zero interest in and didn’t want to hang out with.
“The reason is Ehrenreich himself. He simply lacks that X-factor magnetism that popular lead actors all have. Charming as he was in Hail Caesar!, this beady-eyed fellow doesn’t have ‘it’ — he’s always wearing the same sullen, hiding-out, stone-faced expression, no matter what kind of situation or character he’s playing. He never lifted off the ground or stepped out of bounds in Rules Don’t Apply. I’ll be seriously surprised if he turns out to be a great Han Solo as that Harrison Ford sexy-rogue quality just isn’t in him.”
“In defense of his claim that President Barack Obama didn’t call the loved ones of fallen soldiers, President Trump told Fox News Radio today that reporters [should] ask his chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, whether Obama called him after his son Robert died in Afghanistan in 2010.
“Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, was a lieutenant general at the time.
“‘As far as other presidents, I don’t know, you could ask Gen. Kelly, did he get a call from Obama? I don’t know what Obama’s policy was,’ Trump said.” — from CNN report, filed today at 9:56 am Pacific.
We’re all here together on the same planet, sharing space and trying to be kind and maybe make some things happen. Nobody’s better or worse than anyone else, but it’s not unfair to explore the overall with a sudden-death calculus. If Harvey Weinstein were to die in a plane crash today, some might argue that the world would be a slightly better place. If Kyle Buchanan, Kris Tapley or Scott Feinberg‘s luck were to suddenly run out, the film industry would be a less quantifiable place. If Oliver Stone or Paul Schrader were to fall off a 200-foot cliff, film culture would suddenly have less wit and dimension. If Saoirse Ronan were to get hit by a bus, we’d all be short a Best Actress contender. If Irving the plumber catches a stray bullet, a lot of sinks, bathtubs and toilets wouldn’t function as well. But if Kris Jenner, Kourtney Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Kendall Jenner and Kylie Jenner were to die in a plane crash tomorrow, in what way would the world suddenly be a lesser place? Be honest.
If you’re any kind of cinema hound the crisp, super-detailed capturings from 35mm big-studio films of the classic era should at least give you a semi-stiffie. If they don’t then what can I say? There’s something missing inside you, and there’s no medicine or special diet or surgery than can fix this. And I’m no fan of Sergeant York, mind. Even when I was a kid I found it dreary and sanctimonious, excepting that one portion when Gary Cooper kills several German soldiers and single-handedly captures over 100 of them, etc. But I love the cinematography by Sol Polito, whose other credits include Archie Mayo‘s The Petrified Forest and a slew of Michael Curtiz films including The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Sea Hawk and Captains of the Clouds (Academy Award for Best Color Cinematography) plus Irving Rapper‘s Now, Voyager and Frank Capra‘s Arsenic and Old Lace. A new Bluray is available in the European PAL format, but nothing for NTSC viewers.
Jimmy Kimmel: “I want everyone with a television to watch the show. But if [right-wing assholes are] so turned off by my opinion on health care and gun violence then I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway. Not good riddance, but riddance.”
I flinched when Tracy Smith asked Kimmel if he “deserve[s] to be here now.” Bad guys deserve the bad stuff that happens to them — I get that equation — but I’ve never understood how this or that person “deserves” happiness or great success or a pleasant fate. You can work your ass off and pour your heart into your scheme or career or whatever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean shit in the end. You might deserve to be happy, but that’s no guarantee of anything. You can have one or two things going for you, but there can be five or six things going on beneath that can take you down or stop your train. I’m basically saying that “deserve” is not a word that attuned people should use. It means nothing. I certainly never use it.
Where did I read an observation about the odd-couple pairing of Donald Trump and Mike Pence that compared Trump to the Rat Pack-era Dean Martin and Pence to Hugh Beaumont‘s Ward Cleaver in Leave It To Beaver? While I work on running that down, consider the following from Jane Mayer‘s 10.23 New Yorker piece, “The Danger of President Pence”:
Two gay deserters are standing in front of Mike Pence‘s Tom Dunson in a climactic scene from Red River. Gay guy #1: “Why doncha get your Bible and read over us after you shoot us?” Pence (smug, sneering): “I’m gonna hang ya.” Montgomery Clift (as the closeted Matthew Garth): “No, no you’re not. You’re not gonna hang those men.” Pence: “Who’ll stop me?” Clift: “I will.”
Fandor has posted a video about Chris Nolan‘s favorite films, or those “which may have helped shape his unique directorial sensibility.” 2001: A Space Odyssey (fine), Koyaanisqatsi (potrzebie), The Thin Red Line (“Malick’s portrayal of mental states and memory”) and….wait, Lewis Gilbert‘s The Spy Who Loved Me? Nolan quote: “At a certain point the Bond films fixed in my head as a great example of scope and scale in large scale images.”
Maybe, but The Spy Who Loved Me was the first Bond film to (a) embrace flagrant fakeness, (b) an ironic air-quote attitude and (c) a kind of japey, self-mocking comedic tone. Goldfinger was the first Bond film to pass along a self-amused, partially self-satirizing approach to rugged secret-agent machismo — The Spy Who Loved Me was the first to look the audience in the eye and say, “You may have gathered or deduced that we were having fun with 007 before. Well, from here on we have absolutely no genuine investment in the classic Ian Fleming James Bond realm — it’s all a fucking joke.”
When has Chris Nolan ever come within 1000 miles of Gilbert’s sensibility in anything he’s ever directed?
“Ya home?…my son, this is your time…we own ya…I waited my entire life for this…the world’s gonna start over…what happens now?…the revolution will be live,” etc. Speaking as a dedicated hater of superhero films, as a sworn enemy of the DC/Marvel universes (except for Ant-Man and the first two Captain America films and maybe one or two others), I half-regret acknowledging that Black Panther feels like some kind of rejuvenation, and that even I feel revved about it. This isn’t just a superhero flick — it’s a major rattling of the Mike Pence cage. Yo bumblefucks…we own ya. Fred Hampton lives.
Last Tuesday (7.25) I expressed interest in Mike White‘s Brad’s Status (Amazon/Annapurna, 9.15). The trailer suggested it would be a smart, bone-dry...
Won’t Open Until 2018 (4): Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria; Alex Garland‘s Annihilation; Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma — Spanish-language period drama set in Mexico City; Terrence Malick‘s Radegund, a World War II drama about an Austrian conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis, starring August Diehl and Valerie Pachner (shot last summer but you know Malick — it might not be released until ’18 or even ’19).
